February 12th. Nothing spectacular.

Today was a mostly uneventful day. I marked the two nice entry points for the morning with blue circles. I choked on getting in as I saw them setup, thought "I should really be making these trades" and didn't. Yesterday's early losses had me second guessing my gut. The pivot points were nice and wide due to yesterday's action so when the price dropped to within 3 cents of the primary pivot point, (barely off the bottom of the chart) it should have been my first trade of the day. Then it rallied touched the 1/2R1 mark (dashed red line) it was a key exit and a potential entry into HGD for the slide...if I was quick enough. Considering that the first would have been near a 50 cent clean gain I might have called it a day after one trade...nahhh!

I did get in at the day's high (first green arrow) by buying HGD for the reverse move (Bear ETF) but chickened out (first red) as HGU rallied slightly so I only captured half of the already small move. Later I saw the setup for a possible 200sma resistance and got in just right (second green) and got out at the then bottom (second red).

I missed the middle peak trade just due to trying to wait for a sign that it was actaully going to head back down. It crossed the 1/2R1 too cleanly on the upside for me to enter comfortably either way.

Both were slight winning trades but very small...the whole point though is that I called the two tougher trades, got the direction correct, got in and got out clean enough, although not as potentially profitable as the early stuff.

BTW, the $15.05 peak was yesterday's high that was tested five times and that I missed, I was going to be damned if I didn't take that trade again.

The rest of the day was not work trading as everything was very small...HGD faired no better as the largest move in the afternoon was about 10 cents and it was not clean, lots of chop. For some strange reason I seem to be drawn to trading the choppy stuff, which is why I decided to can the fake trades. I can fake a good moving day so I need to actively trade those days and often they are not known to be good moving days until they are moving...I need to be in trading mode right from the start as often as I can.

Oh, I should mention, that steep rally at about 1015h did not follow any of my current rules for entering a trade...I could have jumped in once it crossed the 200sma on the way up but it was moving too fast to do so. That was when I decided it was going to peak and I would play the downside. I miss my short selling but I have got this figured out now.

Jeff.